My main motive behind writing this post is to let you know about what’s latest and trending on Google and how you can grow your business through user experience first ecosystem for advertising on the internet. So, here is Google AMP (Accelerated mobile pages) secrets or you can call them Google’s amazing inventions that can make entire mobile web experience faster and better for everybody.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

As explained in my previous post, AMP referred to as Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open source project that allows publishers to create mobile optimized content and have it loaded instantly on mobile devices. The key objective behind initiating this project was to lift up user experience by making web pages load at lightning speeds. It has been found that 50% of the mobile users leave a page if it takes more than four seconds to load and 8 out of 10 won’t even return to that page.

The Inception of AMP

We’ve to give credit to the team at Google as time and again they come up with new and innovative ways to provide a better browsing experience to its users. But some visualized that Google created AMP to combat with Facebook instant articles.

There is no hidden secret that these two most popular sites are competing each and every day to dominate online and get the advertising dollars that comes with it.

AMP by Google is an effort to make content discovery more engaging to mobile users.

The Working of AMP

AMP pages are built using three basic components:

1. AMP HTML
Being a lighter version of HTML, it removes many useless parts that make web pages slow to load. Although it is built with some customized tags, it is mostly a subgroup of the language designed with restrictions to get more reliable performance.

2. AMP JavaScript
AMP JavaScript is the simplest version of JavaScript used to leverage the faster loading of AMP HTML pages. To ensure the fast rendering of a page, all of the best performance practices of AMP are implemented by AMP JS library.
One of the most important facts is that it converts all elements from external resources into asynchronous. Therefore, there is no element in the page that can stop the page from rendering.
Note: Any third party JavaScript cannot be used within the AMP framework.

3. AMP CDN
This is a proxy-based content delivery network used to deliver a cached copy of all your valid AMP documents on Google’s server. It enhances the page performance automatically by first fetching the HTML pages and then caching them.
The Google AMP Cache enables all the documents, JS files, and images to load from the same path such as HTTP 2.0 to achieve the maximum performance. As it has a built-in validation system, it assures that the page is guaranteed to work without and dependency on external resources.

Are you worried after reading the above stuff? No, I tell you, it’s really easy to learn AMP as it is similar to our use slang and abbreviations in spoken and written word. There are also many live samples and videos available online to help you create AMP web pages.

Many publishers, advertisers, digital marketers, and ecommerce giants are already leveraging the AMP to boost their business on the mobile web. Take for an example, Milestone- an ecommerce company that witnessed a tremendous increase in mobile transactions, booked revenues, and conversion rates with AMP pages for hospitality site.

AMP for ADs and ALP

With the announcement of Google ad-related initiatives for AMP project in July 2016, AMP for Ads, or A4A served advertisers and publishers with AMP ALP (AMP ad landing pages), to accompany their AMP ads.
One of the toughest challenges was to separate ad requests from ad rendering. Below is an example showing the improvement that A4A brings in loading time of simple ad:

This Google search flow clearly shows that ads built on A4A loads within a second as compared to a non-A4A ad – over 6 times longer than an ad built with AMP HTML.

AMP Ad Landing Pages is created to speed up the experience for the user by preloading the landing page URL in the AMP ad by restricting the landing page to use AMP HTML protocol. Here are the four things that ALP optimize in order to improve the experience of user:

Pre-connect to Landing Page: Unlike normal ads, ads leading to ALP knows the URL of the actual landing page and this is why they can grant a preconnect request to the respective landing page. This ultimately reduces the time span it requires to navigate the user to the landing page after the user clicks.

Pre-fetch Landing Pages: Before the user clicks on the ad, all the non-CPU intensive resources are requested and downloaded from the first viewport of the landing page.

Rendering Google Cache URL When Available: If you are a trafficker and you enter a canonical destination URL for a creative, only after your consent, the ad server can switch it to the AMP version of the URL through AMP URL API. For instance, a publisher like DoubleClick has already adopted this technique and integrated such features for an easier trafficking of AMP landing pages.

Zero Redirects: If required, AMP can exclude redirects to the ad server. So do you’ve any idea about what happens with the redirects? Supported by amp-pixel component, this redirect is only for the purpose of third-party tracking done only on landing pages.

With the ALP, a user can also easily navigate back to the page they were on before their click on the ad.

Ads often come with their measurement tools like data collection of the user which typically increases payload drain, battery usage, execution time, and other performance aspects. But the AMP through its established ‘amp-analytics’ mechanism includes code to perform these measurements that are vendor-neutral and supports an array of metrics. Therefore the ads can benefit from the same “instrument once, report many times” feature that helps AMP pages today by fully eliminating the bandwidth and runtime cost.

RNA (Responsive Native Ads)

After the first Google announcement of its new, dynamic responsive ads that are created randomly from the advertiser provided headline, text, description, an image, and a URL to give the look and feel of a publisher’s content. These automated, responsive native ads are available programmatically and can be purchased by setting bids for targeted ads by device type in Google AdWords. This has definitely helped publishers and advertisers to make responsive ad inventory available for both mobile websites and apps either by programmatic or direct sales.

Google is still working to get a foothold in RNA and bolster its mobile display business to make a dent in the market dominated by Facebook and other social and mobile ad networks.

If you’ve any ideas or if you’re looking for more information on how you can implement the above techniques to grow your business, then please comment in the section below!